26 April 2018

The National Cyber Security Centre is part of GCHQ and was setup by the government last year with £1.9bn of investment.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has joined not-for-profit organisation Secure Chorus as a government member.

Secure Chorus serves as a platform for public-private sector collaboration and is committed to developing a baseline for secure multimedia communication in the digital economy.

The NCSC provides a single, central body for cyber security at a national level and is the UK’s technical authority on cyber. GCHQ is its parent body. It was setup last year as part of the government’s five-year National Cyber Security Strategy, and is supported by £1.9 billion investment.

NCSC technical director Dr. Ian Levy says: “Secure Chorus will play a role in convening a much-needed forum to bring together global industry, governments and academia to promote the development of an ecosystem of secure and interoperable products based on open standards.”

The centre says it has joined Secure Chorus alongside major global telecom operators, system integrators, defence prime contractors, technology companies, academic institutions and trade bodies. 

These include: Vodafone, O2, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, Leonardo, Sepura, Serbus, Cryptify, Armour Communications, SQR Systems, ISARA Corporation, Secoti, Surevine, Galaxkey, Cyber Synopsis, CSIT, UCL and techUK.

Secure Chorus chairperson Elisabetta Zaccaria says securing the digital world can only be achieved through public-private collaboration.

Secure Chorus chairperson Elisabetta Zaccaria says: “We recognise that the global digital world needs baseline security as much as the non-digital world. We firmly believe that this can only be achieved through increased public-private collaboration and development of common standards.”

The organisation adds that it is currently focusing on several initiatives to help develop a growing ecosystem of secure and interoperable products, services and infrastructure for multimedia communication. 

Members are also collaborating on the development of a post-quantum identity based crypto scheme to update Secure Chorus’ current cryptography standard of choice. 

Secure Chorus says the aim of this ecosystem approach is to enable secure, cross-platform multimedia communications that are “highly scalable and flexible”, and give the domain manager full control of the security of the system.